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Articles

Cyber-Animism and Augmented Dreams by Tamiko Thiel

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Cyber-Animism and Augmented Dreams
By Tamiko Thiel

Baaderstrasse 64, 80469 Munich, Germany
Email: tamiko[at]alum.mit.edu
Web: http://mission-base.com/tamiko/
Abstract

To those who were active in the first wave of virtual reality online in the mid 1990s, the current boom in augmented reality (AR) has a strange sense of déjà vu. Tamiko Thiel did pioneering work on online 3D virtual worlds with Starbright World from 1994-1997, and is now one of the founding members of the augmented reality cyberartists’ group Manifest.AR. In this informal report she explicates the underlying parallels she sees in the lure of cyberspace, then and now, and how AR artists are bringing the gap between seen and unseen realities.
Keywords: augmented reality, AR, virtual reality, cyberspace, smartphone, animism

 

Lanfranco Aceti is known for his social activism and extensive career as artist, curator, and academic. He is a research affiliate and visiting professor at ACT @ Massachusetts Institute of Technology and director of the Arts Administration Program at Boston University. He is also the Editor in Chief of the Leonardo Electronic Almanac, The MIT Press. He has exhibited numerous personal projects including Car Park, a public performance in the UK at the John Hansard Gallery; Who The People?, an installation artwork acquired in its entirety by the Chetham’s Library and Museum in Manchester; Sowing and Reaping, installation artworks acquired in their entirety by the National Museum of Contemporary Art of Cyprus; and Hope Coming On, a site-specific choral performance he designed for the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, with the collaboration of the Boston Children’s Chorus, and realized in front of Turner’s Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On). In 2017, Aceti prepared a series of new artworks for an exhibition entitled Shimmer and curated by Irini Papadimitriou (V&A) at the Tobazi Mansion in Hydra, a new large choral performance titled Accursed for the Thessaloniki Biennial in Greece; and Knock, Knock, Knocking a public space installation in the Mediterranean Garden Pavilion of the New Sea Waterfront of Thessaloniki.